Big mess at MASS MoCA

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Swiss artist Christoph B0chel have been feuding since late last year over the artist's huge installation, which was originally to have opened on Dec. 16, 2006, in the museum's football-field-size Building 5. When the cost of Buchel's project soared to $300,000 from an initial $160,000 budget, director Joseph Thompson pulled the plug in late December, shortly after the artist had departed for the holidays on Dec. 17. Buchel has said that he was expecting to return and complete the installation by the revised opening date of Mar. 3, 2007.

Titled Training Ground for Democracy, the installation was intended to re-create the mock-up villages and virtual-reality software used by the U.S. Army to train troops for service in Afghanistan and Iraq. As with other of Buchel's projects, visitors' movement through the work was crucial to experiencing and understanding it. Among its elements are a movie theater, a mobile home, cargo containers, a carousel rigged with explosives, a guard tower, a two-story house divided by a cinderblock wall, a tanker truck, cars and thousands of found objects.

Thompson told the New York Times that the final straw was a list of items Buchel requested when he departed for the holidays, including a bombed-out jetliner fuselage. However, an earlier e-mail from Thompson to Buchel--partially quoted on the blog of Donn Zaretsky, Buchers lawyer [theartlawblog.blogspot.com]--makes reference to the museum's difficulty in obtaining that particular item in September 2006. According to the Times, after his departure the artist also insisted that he would "not accept any orders and any more pressure or compromises as to how things have to be done from the museum director or museum's technicians." Relations between the artist and museum soured, and B0chel never returned to finish the installation.

Instead, the museum, which is known for undertaking elaborate installations on an annual visual-arts budget of $800,000, including salaries, opened a show titled "Made at MASS MoCA" on May 26 as a project documenting an installation "planned with" Buchel. MASS MoCA filed suit against the artist in U.S. District Court, seeking protection to display the assembled objects as a "back lot workshop." An evidentiary hearing is scheduled for Sept. 21. Pending the court's decision, the objects are partially concealed with tarps and construction fencing, which visitors pass through on their way to the makeshift show. "Made at MASS MoCA" features newspaper clippings on the controversy and purportedly explores the complexities of museum-artist collaborations by providing an overview of other (successful) large-scale projects at MASS MoCA by such artists as Tim Hawkinson, Ann Hamilton, Gregory Crewdson, Carsten Holler and Cai Guo-Qiang.

In July, Buchel responded with a lawsuit of his own, asking the court to order the museum to dismantle his work, citing the Visual Artists Rights Act, a U.S. law passed in 1990 that asserts the artist's "fundamental artistic, or 'moral,' rights with respect to his reputation and the integrity of his works of visual art." Filed court documents state that "Buchel has the right to prevent the display of an unfinished, distorted and modified work of visual art of which he is the sole author and that is attributable to him." Among Buchel's counterclaims are those asserting that MASS MoCA mismanaged the installation, spending excessively on certain elements of the show. He also claims that he and museum officials did not formally agree on a budget or discuss what would happen if funds ran out, though Thompson told the New York Times that there was a basic agreement in the form of a letter and follow-up e-mails. MASS MoCA has also filed a counterclaim, maintaining that, in its current state, Buchel's project is not art and that the institution and the artist jointly own both the procured items and the copyright.

Observers' reactions have ranged from shocked indignation at the artist's demands and inability to complete his work to reproach of the museum for misrepresenting the artist's work. Shock seems to prevail, as well, that no contract was drawn up for such an elaborate undertaking (though such documents are scarce in the art world). Some have even mused that the showdown itself is Bechel's intended publicity-grabbing "project."

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